Thoughts on culture and events by author and illustrator Christopher R Taylor

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

NOT ENOUGH, AGAIN

“Soak the rich, eh? They do not have the money”

I've said this before. Others have said this before. Its been prove again and again, but it bears repeating, especially in the Bizzarro world we now live in where demanding the federal government cut the deficit makes you a terrorist who destroyed the economy.

You can tax all the wealthy people in America and it still isn't enough to pay down the deficit. Sure, the left keep crying about how we must raise taxes, and that not raising taxes is evil and like strapping a bomb on your and taking the economy hostage, but the fact is... there's not enough money out there.

8,274 people with incomes of $10 million per year or more earned a total of $240 billion in 2009. Taxing them 100% covers the federal spending of the US for just 18 days.

227,000 people earned $1 million or more in 2009. That totals $227,000,000,000, or 16% of the annual debt - about 56 days of spending.

There's just not enough money in the rich to pay for the debt, even if you keep redefining rich down as low as $250,000 a year, as President Obama does. You have to dip into the rest of the taxpayers below that level. And you can't raise the taxes by a little.

As Don Surber notes, if you doubled income taxes on the entire tax-paying population of America you still come up short by $400,000,000,000. For the year, not the total debt.

In other words

TAXES CANNOT SOLVE THIS PROBLEM, MISTER PRESIDENT.

You get into debt by spending, you get out of debt by cutting that spending. Period.